


Knock One Canvas

by RushAround



Series: Scooter's Crew [3]
Category: The Property of Hate
Genre: Alternate Universe, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Hurt/Comfort, Physical Abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-06
Updated: 2018-06-06
Packaged: 2019-05-19 02:06:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,593
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14864601
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RushAround/pseuds/RushAround
Summary: Jo decides to visit Argyle in his trailer at the end of the day but he doesn't seem to be home.





	Knock One Canvas

It wasn’t like her to knock. Most usually, one could expect her to squeeze into his trailer via the small window around the back after making boosting use of a prop crate or some such. The front door hardly saw much action, for it lay within the visual confines of the Mr. Director, and no such dilly dallying as goodnights or goodmornings would be had upon his watch, for time was money, though money continued to be money and time continued to be time. Given the time.

In any case, it was a curious matter as what had driven Jojo Tambourine to circle his trailer, place herself before it where all could see her stand in the jaws of the freezing November air, and knock on his door, once again, asking for entry.

“Argyle, open the door.”

The cheap, frozen, metal shell clunked lazily beneath the rim of her jangling tambourine as she bumped it three- a fourth time thereupon. After shooting, she’d always wrap a stray scrap of pearl blue fabric about the instrument to muffle the mingling finger bells and loose wooden frame as they jumbled about while she walked, a terrible distraction. At one time, she’d do the same with the instrument’s scarf of a tail, but has since been scolded into an alternate means by the hen of the props department.

As noisy as her and her accessories proved to be, however, the inside of the star’s trailer offered no sound to compliment. The small woman’s coloured brow furrowed slightly in frustration, albeit spackled in concern, and disregarding the surveillance about, she hopped from the short staircase leading up to the front door and made a round of the trailer for the second time, passing the misused makeup bag she’d brought along, deposited on the frosted concrete, out of the way.

Her once secret entry way hadn’t disappeared in the 4 minutes she’d taken to knock, thankfully, and the small, hardly a foot and a half by one foot window was precisely where she’d left it, along with the glint of the locking latch slid into place from the inside, which was a further curious matter to attend to.

Standing below the window, still quite in full costume of high collared pink and turquoise jacket and swayful silken scarfs and sashes, Jo stared up at the portal, as perfectly sized for her as it was perfectly locked. She began to pace, heeled black shoes cutting paths in the meager cold cover of the concrete.

It was not like her to knock, true, it was unwise, but furthermore, it was unlike him to lock the window. The front door, of course, that is a given, but the window would always be open. Always. Even in dry dry July when a blaze had nearly wrung the man of his life due to an accidental cigarette bud finding its way thrown in through the open window amidst obvious fingerprints and dropped carelessly upon extremely flammable somethings or others. He had lost several straw hats that day. The Mr. Director and the Mr. Producer were not pleased. Trailers and hats were expensive of course.

Even so, the window was always, always, always unlocked. Always open. For her. This was a given and taken between them - Argyle and Jo - to keep everyone, but each other, out.

Much as the thought occurred to her, she couldn’t very well smash the window with her tambourine - though she didn’t much care for the instrument and had made an enemy with the window as of late - The noise and damage were all too much to think about, and she couldn’t possibly squeeze another worry into the wall to wall crowd of her cerebral entourage.

And so she, Jo, went back to knocking and asking and demanding and knocking.

“Argyle!…Argyle open the door.” No answer. “Argyle, why did you lock the window?” No answer. “Argyle.”

She’d reached the point wherein she’d spoken his name so many times, it was on the brink of becoming gibberish or something in needing of an incorrect abbreviation. Cosmos forbid.

And so it was that Jojo Tambourine sat herself upon the frigid steps of the star’s trailer, chin propped on a hand propped on a knee, and sighed deeply, breath swirling into the pale light of an overhanging door lamp. It wasn’t terribly late in the evening, but even in the afternoon sun, the studio grounds held a certain stern and carefully calibrated stillness that made every action save for remaining perfectly still - and/or unconscious - completely unnatural.

And so she did neither.

“You got out late today, that I know. Director Man looked pretty twisted in the corns after that wrap on the Gypsy Party Skit. Didn’t boil you out because you twirled your shamboo stick one time too many did he?”

Silence.

“I spotted Producer Fella’s car out front after my bit got tacked and taped. Director Man sent me off like my heels were blazing. I had a bad feeling in my bones stepping out of set, which is new, but I’ll happen a guess to say it had something to do with the fact you were covered in bad eyes all day.”

Silence followed by silence.

“Did you get a few private words on you? Don’t tell me you got fired, you lucky goose. Course you didn’t. They need you around here, but all I’m saying is if you wanted to build a hearth in Director Man’s mouth, right then looked like the time to do it.”

A barrage of silence followed by a deafening silence.

“…The rough hands didn’t get you again, did they? It’s been barely a week, they don’t round on you this early, did you do or say something out of that shotgun mouth of yours to get them wanting to teach you to tears?”

The silence crept timidly back into the aisle. She refused it a seat, another round of knocking filling the row. Even the muffling scarf couldn’t keep in the determined jangles of the tambourine as she smacked it quite a touch harder against the metal door.

The cold was starting to sink its teeth into the exposed spots of flesh it had already taken hold of, slowly bringing a shiver to her shoulders and an unsightly redness to her fingers. She only hoped the wind wouldn’t find its way into the studio grounds, though the looming building itself proved quite a fine blockade of many things.

“Argyle, open the door!!” She banged upon it, harder, as if hoping to scare away the timber wolves and shivers. “Argyle! Come on! It’s freezing out here!”

“…Trust me…I….I know…”

The low, accented voice did not come from within the trailer, where she would have expected its owner to be. Instead, it seemed to tap her shoulder from behind, puff at her attention, brush the backside of her ear. So very polite, unlike its surroundings or its proprietor.

She stopped knocking, rested the brim of the tambourine upon the door and half turned to gaze at the man whom was supposed to be inside the trailer but, most obviously, was not.

Argyle B. Guide was blue.

That is to say, he was absolutely frigid.

That is to say, he was rather cold.

For when he stepped slowly into the pale light of the trailer’s door lamp, gazing up the steps at Jo, it seemed to wash the pallid palette of his face with turpentine and brought an unpleasant tightness to the woman’s throat. He looked, and most likely was, drained and exhausted, pale brown eyes, one still healing, sullen and lidded low beneath violet brows buried in a faint furrow, lips trembling as trepidatiously as the rest of him.

He’d been caught and beaten again. The language of bruising across his face marked the tale, loud exclamations of injury shouting from his left cheek, his bottom lip, the underside of his chin. They had thrown him to the ground, most certainly. She wondered if they’d stomped on his back, or how many times they’d kicked him this time.

Now, it wasn’t as if she’d ever watched the instances from beginning to end, Argyle simply happened talk in his sleep sometimes.

His arms were draped in the meager fabrics of a dress shirt, folded awkwardly across his front. His left crossed over his right, one hand gripping his upper arm, the other, his opposite side whereupon bloomed colour, as if the painter of his pose had taken Van Gogh’s trail of thought and had begun wetting his brushes with his tongue until the madness had funneled through him, straight to his work.

Though…lead traces could only do so much to harm a man already pumping with poison.

She wondered where his blazer had gone.

He was so very pale, Jo was sure this was the closest to a ghost he had ever gotten, but congratulations would be held off. Instead, she turned fully and descended the short stairs to meet him, making certain not to let anything save for impatience show in her gait. His feet dragged.

“Argyle.”

“Inside.”

“What?”

He stumbled sideways, shaking his head. His arms tightened and he watched her eyes flick from his face to his side and back again. He made certain to square his lips when next she faced him, firming his jaw and trying to force the slouch in his shoulders to appear purposeful. His vision was swimming and drowning.

“…Inside. Speak with me…inside…” He muttered and braced himself, within and without, before letting his weight carry his body forward.

He turned the inertia of dissipating balance into a gait, striding past Jo in what he imagined to be control.

What she saw was the exact opposite. what she chose to mention was nothing.

He reached a hand out and pressed it flat to the door, elbow crumpling slightly until the whole of his forearm was placed thereupon, supporting the perpetual forwards lean of his body as heavy consciousness seemed to leak from his nose, hook on his upper lip and bring a hang to his head.

She watched his shoulders rise, then drop, the tremble about them travelling down his back via the spineless man’s spine and diluting about the waist. Round his side peeked his fingertips, wrapped tightly around a ruined wad of his shirt, though she could very well say it wasn’t doing much help to hide the fact there’d been more than fists in the conversation.

She could not help him find his keys or steady himself, could not provide a support at his side so that he might not collapse and then, find no strength to rise again. Outside, Jo could only stand there, cross her arms tightly, and hope he did not, indeed, fall over.

A keyhole was filled, clumsily, and the trailer door pushed open to swallow up the man before it, whom stumbled into the darkness therein most willingly. The door was shut promptly behind him, hardly an action of emotional vice, but tight all the same.

Jo knew this, and called to her queue - as she was so very skilled in doing - took her time seizing the old makeup bag from the shadow of the stairs and making her way around the trailer, out of the blazing cold light of the door lamp.

She waited under the small back window for precisely 3 and a half minutes before climbing onto the ever useful useless crates nearby and tapping a well manicured nail impatiently upon the glass. A pause, as if the only resident within had only just remembered they’d company, followed by a small, metallic click.

The lock now released, Jo wedged her overly lacquered fingers into the tiny space between the frame and the pane, and slid it open, letting the cool night air seep inside. Unhitching the old makeup bag from her shoulder, she passed it and her tambourine inside, and soon followed.

She’d long mastered the art of wiggling through the opening without tearing her oddly offensive costume - Not that she particularly cared for the get-up. It was truly a question of another’s opinion, which one might have done well to regard equate to a branding iron, fearing the item more in certain hands than others.

The inside of the trailer wasn’t precisely as dark as she thought it would be. That being said, Jo could only barely make out the man’s bed through the gloom, the side lamp and overbearing vanity lights having been left undisturbed, which might’ve been for the best, honestly. They were, as mentioned, overbearing and would surely frighten the ever merciful darkness. She certainly didn’t want that.

She caught his name before it escaped again and swallowed it back down, loathe to further distill the pigment she used to colour the weekends. It rolled back to rest in ribbons at the base of her belly like soft sugar pierced by the lip of a taffy hook. Tainted with paint chips.

“It’s dark.”

A sharp exhale across the space responded.

Trying to feel out whatever she could before her and soon finding the clothed surface of the single bed, she used its corner to navigate closer, stepping slowly and carefully, lest she trip over a pair of his many multicolored and quite fake, cheap spats she knew he kept lined up against the wall like limbless soldiers forced back into battle.

“I’ll get the lamp.” She muttered, though her eyes had been beginning to adjust, and she could now make out a figure sat before the vanity. She sincerely hoped it was Argyle, and no one else. She could do that in the trailer. She could hope it was Argyle.

The bedside lamp was ancient and nothing else. The plastic knob upon its side had long since vacated its post, leaving behind a rusted, decrepit and very hard to grasp metal sprig one had to carefully pinch between forefinger and thumb, like the pinky finger of a malnourished but horribly misbehaving child, and apply rotating pressure until it relented and clicked into the assumed “on” position. This had to be repeated twice or three times, until the spawn learned its lesson.

Soft yellow light found its way impeding inappropriately upon the darkness, sending it running straight to Human Resources. The small trailer’s interior was lit, almost completely, which reminded Jo perhaps of how powerful the ancient lap truly was, or how small Argyle’s trailer continued to be.

She let it coil itself around corners and explore the meager space to its head’s content, washing and wrangling Argyle’s frame from the theatrical prowess of the darkness as it did. No loss in terms of presentation. All that was to be left for the screen, for the eyes of the Mr. Director, followed by several of the same take. Quite the perfectionist, the Mr. Director.

His trailer was an ashtray, and he, a cigarette, smoked crooked by studio lips and stubbed ankles deep in embers. He slouched before his vanity and would not lift his head to the mirror. Though Jo suspected his posture bowed below a force greater than general exhaustion and pinpointed pains. And so she approached before the lamp light could claim him completely, and stopped close by.

He shifted in his seat as he sensed her encroach, an arm folding closer to his bending body. She wondered vaguely if he’d eventually split between the shoulder blades and burst with tobacco. However, he’d already many a form in her mind, she had no need to carry him closer to another, was she even capable of carrying him, which she was not.

A breath left his body, stumbling as it did and his hands tightened where they met at his side, folded one over the other. The fabric that pinched between his fingers easily appeared darker than the rest of the garment, even shrouded in the shadow of his pose. He was bleeding, in one of six ways she knew he could, and so she rounded his seat, took his face in her hands, and lifted it to the light.

He did not resist her. He never did. Her hands were dry, and cold. She’d yet to recover from her wait outside, but he came to selfishly find the coolness somewhat soothing against the flare of fresh injury. He was not so eloquently painted indoors as he was out. In his trailer, he was injured. In his trailer, she could worry. Close to the weekends but not quite as good.

The colour of his hair this week - a rich royal purple - glanced by the yellowed light of the ancient lamp made vintage music of his face. Shadows drew themselves from beneath her fingers to dip like clouded water into the divots of his accentuated cheekbones, his properly smooth brow, and his perfect nose. She placed her thumb just short of his right eye’s inner corner and traced it outwards, to his temple, taking a smudge of flesh toned makeup with it.

Beneath, a healing bruise pursed like a backstage prodigy, the only indication that the previous week had ever existed. The taping could hardly be trusted, after all. She watched his eye climb to her face under a slow blink, the lamplight gilding the pale brown within. Though if there’d been anything gold about him, it was most likely capped. One could still enjoy the glow, however, if one did not search for seams.

Which is precisely what she did, though what she most usually found had yet to change.

Even as his body broke the stillness between them, shoulders giving a faint shudder, as his gaze grew lidded and vacant of sense, she held his face a little longer - until she could be certain if warmth was returning to his skin or not - before freeing him of eye contact and allowing herself to assert his state. She knelt closer, lower, releasing his face to place her hands upon his knees, for lack of anywhere else to brace them.

She felt his head bow to rest upon her shoulder and paused, as if to see what would happen next. His chest swelled around a sharp intake of breath, then regressed, his shoulders sloping as the exhale warmed her where it landed. His head tilted slightly, face turning further towards her. She wondered if her coat’s rough fabric stung his bad eye, despite better intention underneath, and decided he could use something softer soon enough.

After all, if he began to kiss her neck, he surely would not have been able to stop.

Once more, he did not resist her when she carefully unfolded his hands from his side. His fingers were cold, bare and stained, laying upon his lap as limply as the gloves he seemed to have lost. Though, between takes, she came to notice that even his empty coat, hanging off the back of his chair, held more life and movement than its bearer. On set anyway.

He didn’t flinch until after she’d parted the soaked tear in his shirt. She quickly curled back a prodding finger, and instead spread her palm evenly across the wound. Her hands were still cool, but they were there, at the very least.

He mumbled something about broken glass as she wrapped her other arm around his opposite side and took a handful of his shirt between the shoulder blades. No tobacco, but it felt damp.

“Argyle.” She cut his name clean off the silence. His fingers twitched.  
“Stand, come on now- I’ll help you.”

And she did, offering her small frame as he braced his shoes against the trailer floor and slowly rose like an apprehensive drawbridge. She decided to ignore the way his knees cracked. His face did not leave her shoulder until it absolutely had to through course of height, but her arms remained, which was nice.

Through a mutual stumble, she managed to ease the fall of his barn wall body towards his bed. Tucked in the corner and meagerly sized as it was, it still managed to seize almost half the available trailer space, though, Jo had long since conceded that given even less space, there’d still be little else to do but sit, and sleep, and hide.

Argyle felt her release him and move.

His shoes were pulled off and promptly discarded. She paused in her attempts to kick them aside, and considered the old makeup bag left in the shadows. She could leave it here, the contents were meant for him, after all, and they would keep a day or so.

Argyle heard the lamp dowse and the darkness weighed almost pleasantly against his exhausted eyes. He felt the bed shift, and drowsily reached out, voice as timid as action.

“Jo…Are you there?”

She watched him roll onto his good side and curl up as well as he could. A dirty hand gripped the blanket.

“..Jo…”

“I’m here.”

“…Are you?”

A pause, as if she wondered such herself. But that was preposterous. She had no reason to wonder. What was, was, and wherever she believed herself to be, she probably was. Doubt only pulled if it ever got a grip.

And so she believed that she was in Argyle’s trailer, that she found his face in the darkness, that she brushed a hand through his hair and kissed his forehead. And she probably had.

Probably.

“…Sleep it off, Argyle. Tomorrow’s friday.” She told him. “So sleep it off..”

And she believed he did just that. Slept till he was off and back again.


End file.
